Fake Loud

When audio is intentionally distorted to sound as though it's extremely loud. Like, speaker-destroyingly loud. Ear-damagingly loud. And yet...not loud. Because, you see, the volume hasn't actually changed. It's Fake Loud. Basically, anytime you want to the listener to understand "this is loud" without actually, you know, deafening them.

When it's portrayed, Fake Loudness might actually be mixed at the same volume as other elements in the music/audio. But since it's meant to convey extreme loudness, various distortions are used to emulate this. This can include: Various reverb effects (to simulate vast echoes), sudden tinniness to the sound (as if the speaker's been blown out), crackling, digital squelching, white noise, high-pitched ringing, or a subtle/complete deafening of other sounds in the mix. Can also be acheived by severely clipping the audio levels for a rawer sound, or, when recording, muffling the sound.

An auditory trope. In music, used purely for cool. See also the Loudness War. Compare Steel Ear Drums. Compare Up to Eleven.

Examples of Fake Loud include:

• In a general sense, any song incorporating a lot of guitar feedback is affecting this as a style.
• "Gutter" by Paper Route features a distored and explosive bass tone that crackles as if it's being digitally clipped.
• "Take You Out At The Ballgame" by El-P has what sounds like actual explosions going off in time with a drum hit. Crackling and audio distortions abound, but what is really convincing is a subtle decrease in the volume of the other sounds, as if the explosions are actually deafening.
• At the end of "Incredibad" by The Lonely Island is a loud explosion followed immediately by muffled ambient background noise and a car-alarm, giving the effect that the listener has hearing damage.
• "Mushrooms" by Xzibit is similar; after a gunshot at the end, Xzibit's voice is muffled and there's a high-pitched ringing noise.
• "Halfway Home" by Blacakalicious and DJ Shadow intentionally cranks the reverb up to distorted and deafening levels, making the music sound like it was recorded using a cheap microphone at a live concert (which is contrasted nicely against the vocalist's perfectly normal and studio-quality vocals)..
• Mike Oldfield made the titular Tubular Bells sound louder by holding down the peak volume until the moment they appear.
• In Band of Brothers and The Pacific (at least on the DVD, rather than on broadcast where the audio may be compressed) all of the weaponry is deliberately mixed at a much higher peak level than the speech or music. This is particularly noticeable in scenes where battle erupts without warning - if you have the TV adjusted for normal speech you'll be deafened.
• The Ringwraiths in the LotR movies. According to the commentaries, they worked very hard to make the scream sound loud without actually being loud.
• The D-City Rock music video from episode 10 of Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt. [1]
• Our Man Flint. Flint turns up the volume on an enemy Mook's headphones. The audience hears the intense noise as a hideous screeching.
• The band Sleigh Bells practically runs on this, with nearly every song featuring heavy distortion on every element in the song and raw production.
• A lot of popular electronic music has been doing this, ever since Justice released their excessively distorted debut album in 2007. Skrillex is a modern main offender. Some of these efforts have perpetuated the Loudness War.
  • A popular effect in modern dance music is known as sidechain compression. In a nutshell, it uses one sound (like a kick drum) to affect the volume of another sound (like the chords), giving it that distinctive pumping sound and making the kick drum sound a lot louder than it is.
  • Before this, intentional distortions in music were used as far back as the 60s. Jimi Hendrix's famed distortion came from live concerts, where only the vocals would be broadcast over the concert's PA system and the instruments would come out of amplifiers. As a result, the amplifiers had to be turned Up to Eleven just to get the guitar as loud as his voice, resulting in the distinctive fuzzy overdrive tone.
  • Rock groups such as Sonic Youth, Velvet Underground and guitarist Robert Fripp, as well as countless industrial acts from The Eighties onwards, have used plenty of Fake Loud noises and textures.
• The overuse of gated white noise sweeps (plus the overamplification of the main synth) in uplifting trance music.
• As The Veneer Of Democracy Starts To Fade by Mark Stewart & The Maffia. Prior to the recording Stewart had been going to Dub Soundsystems (which deliberately play at ear splitting levels) and bootlegging them with a cheap cassette recorder so he could relive the memories at home. He liked the effect so much he had the engineer produce the whole album like that. It's hard to explain, but there's a discernible difference between turning everything up very loud in the studio and a live bootleg of an incredably loud performance done on cheap equipment, and the engineer managed to capture it perfectly. Even down to the particular quirks caused by Soundsystems often working with rudimentary mixing equipment and the amateur engineers/DJ's not quite understanding how everything works/being too messed up to care. The only part that gives it away is some of the panning, which would be impossible to capture in the way it's pretending, but it sounds cool so why not? They genuinely went to extraordinary levels to make the album sound as terrible as possible.